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eldavojohn writes with an update to the CRU email leak story we've been following for the past two weeks. The peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature has published an article saying the emails do not demonstrate any sort of "scientific conspiracy," and that the journal doesn't intend to investigate earlier papers from CRU researchers without "substantive reasons for concern." The article notes, "Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers." Reader lacaprup points out related news that a global warming skeptic plans to sue NASA under the Freedom of Information Act for failing to deliver climate data and correspondence of their own, which he thinks will be "highly damaging." Meanwhile, a United Nations panel will be conducting its own investigation of the CRU emails.

The researchers did not use certain tree ring data post 1960 because it was not properly calibrated to instrumental data. There has been much hoo-hah about this "throwing out" of data when really it is the instrumental data that matters, not the proxy data. If temperature is what you are after, thermometers are the gold standard. Therefore the post 1960 results really aren't in question. Furthermore, many critics of Mann et al. have ignored the fact that this was a single line of data turning a blind eye to the numerous other data sets and proxies that support the same conclusions. I find it disingenuous to claim that all climatology is now in question due to this "trick". I will, however, admit that the researchers should have noted the issues with the tree-ring data in question.

If one completely ignores any of the above data sets (whether they be direct measurements or proxies), there exist many disparate observations of global warming ranging from the rise in sea level which threatens various nations' lands to the melting of the arctic tundra to the loss of glaciation document global warming independently of these scientists' data. All the data seem to indicate is that the warming is happening on a scale that it has not before. By itself, this should indicate that the hockey stick curve is real. But is this warming due to humans?

Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) critics seem to espouse ideas such as the solar cycle hypothesis or Milankovich hypothesis rather than admit that humans can change the atmosphere. On the BBC this morning I even heard a listener letter that explained how volcanoes were the cause of the increased CO2 in the atmosphere. This ignores some of the more obvious ways in which humans can change the atmosphere. This year, the Chinese government limited fossil fuel burning before the Olympics with apparently stunning results. When I was in Beijing for nearly a month 10 years ago, smog was a daily occurance. Even miles outside the city at Badaling (the Great Wall), it was hard to see for more than a mile. Smog is considered to be the third most important greenhouse gas by the IPCC. Evidence that we are changing our own atmosphere by fossil fuel emission is obvious just by looking.

"Evidence that we are changing our own atmosphere by fossil fuel emission is obvious just by looking."
this nonetheless does not imply that such changes have a nontrivial impact on the climate.
in other words, smog!=AGW. i would think this were obvious.

The N20 componet of smog [wikipedia.org] is indeed the "the third most important greenhouse gas" as claimed in the GP's informative post. Note that the arosols contained in smog also has a significant cooling effect but I don't think we want to give any encouragement to the coal industry to resume killing "large numbers" of people with pea soupers [wikipedia.org]

And first most important greenhouse gas is water vapor. Regardless of the truth of AGW, it is not immediately obvious that smog in cities indicates or leads to a significant effect in the atmosphere. I believe in AGW but let's not claim the climate science is easy to understand or obvious. This is why I get angry when AGWers equate those that disbelieve in AGW with creationists; the principles behind evolution are much easier and more intuitive to understand than climate science is.

It is true that water vapor is the strongest greenhouse gas. However, that's certainly not the entire story. It is also true that it is carbon dioxide that is upsetting the balance in the Earth's ability to regulate itself. As humans pump more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere while simultaneously cutting down huge swaths of forest (and thereby harming the Earth's ability to scrub carbon dioxide), the Earth's ability to cool itself is significantly reduced. As this process accelerates, the ice caps melt, releasing more water vapor into the atmosphere via evaporation, further compounding the effect caused by unregulated carbon dioxide emissions.

This all adds up to an accelerating snowball effect that by the end of the century could see average global temperatures increase by six degrees Celsius. That means no more year-round snow and ice on the polar ice caps, sea levels meters above "normal" and a whole host of problems for flora and fauna (us) alike. The science is in, and the denialists are endagering us all.

This is a classic case of Pascal's Wager, except that in this case it is actually a good argument. If we do nothing and anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real, we risk the end of civilization as we know it. If we take aggressive action and AGW turns out to be hogwash, then we'll have taken long steps toward cleaning up our environment: a net positive for many reasons unrelated to AGW, including reduced loss of habitat, healthier oceans (and fisheries), and fewer pollutants in our food and water. Why some people insist that we should continue to rape our planet as we've always done seems, in this light, grossly irresponsible and short-sighted.

I should add that AGW denialists are in the same camp as creationists because they willfully disbelieve science they do not understand so that they can rationalize closely held, pig-headed beliefs which only serve to preserve the status quo. Change is often hard and uncomfortable; even costly. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't embrace it. Read some ACTUAL science instead of letting people with an agenda spoon-feed you lies.

I liked your post, it was passionate and articulate, except for this bit of drivel you stuck in there:

This is a classic case of Pascal's Wager, except that in this case it is actually a good argument.

Pascal's wager is never a good argument. It's still a false dichotomy, and even without the usual issue of whether a person can simply choose to change their beliefs (like the original version), it allows the one proposing the wager to set up outcomes favorable to them while ignoring other possibilities.

If we do nothing and anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real, we risk the end of civilization as we know it.

Even if AGW is completely real, it may be more mild that we expect and turn out to be a mere nuisance. Or it may be easy to geoengineer global cooling 60 years from now. Or it might be fairly cheap to build levees around cities, move and rebuild other bit of civilization, ect. Or there may be some other solution that I haven't thought of, or even that nobody has thought of yet.

If we take aggressive action and AGW turns out to be hogwash, then we'll have taken long steps toward cleaning up our environment: a net positive for many reasons unrelated to AGW, including reduced loss of habitat, healthier oceans (and fisheries), and fewer pollutants in our food and water.

If AGW isn't real, and we take aggressive action, we will have wasted trillions that could have been spent on cleaning up real pollution more effectively. And millions die in third-world nations because they aren't allowed to use their fossil fuels to industrialize. And dictators use the threat of AGW to get other countries to give them nuclear tech, which they use to make weapons. And many other things that could possibly go wrong.

There has been much hoo-hah about this "throwing out" of data when really it is the instrumental data that matters, not the proxy data. If temperature is what you are after, thermometers are the gold standard

You might have a point if the leaked file only demonstrated a single case of data tampering, but it's all over the place. Anyone with a copy of FOI2009.zip and grep can verify this.

What all of this "data" leaves out is the tree-ring minima and ice core acidity peaks that, when integrated with other regional and global climatological events stretching back, at the very least, to 4375 BCE, present a picture of some kind of cyclical, apparently cosmically induced climate cycle. The current period of this cycle is just over 105 years, so any theory that doesn't take into account our position in this cycle--101 out of 105 years (2009-1908)--is suspect. In short, lay the average temperature rise from 1908 until 2009 over that for 1803 until 1904 and see what you get. I would strongly suspect that you will see little if any change cycle to cycle.

So lets have some examples. Or are you just another hand waving "skeptic"?

BTW: The single case you refer to has been explained numerous times as an attemp to DISPROVE a signal had been found. You seem unfamiliar with the concept of self-skepticisim so I can see how that might have escaped your notice. The fact remains that In the end the code was never used and the graph labeled VERY ARTIFICIAL was never published. I'm sure as hell that if I was fiddling data for a global conspiracy I would not put a label like that on the resulting graph, would you?

This year, the Chinese government limited fossil fuel burning before the Olympics with apparently stunning results. When I was in Beijing for nearly a month 10 years ago, smog was a daily occurance. Even miles outside the city at Badaling (the Great Wall), it was hard to see for more than a mile. Smog is considered to be the third most important greenhouse gas by the IPCC. Evidence that we are changing our own atmosphere by fossil fuel emission is obvious just by looking.

This kind of trend can be seen on a daily cycle in New Delhi. Overnight, the smog over the city disperses but returns over the course of the day (typically by 11am) only to dissipate again as the city slows down for the night.

Nice try. The tree ring data was used as a proxy for temperature. The results of this proxy formula didn't match up with actual temperature readings past 1960, so to make their method look like it had more skill (accuracy) than it did, they simply grafted the actual temperature series to the end of the tree ring proxy temperature series. This is what was meant by "hide the decline".

A real scientist would have investigated why the proxy failed to to reflect actual temperatures in recent times, and might have questioned if the methodology actually applied correctly to any time in the past. Instead, they grafted apples to oranges and then told everyone they had discovered something that they had not.

Very bad science. If this happened in any other field, these clowns would be out of a job.

A real scientist would have investigated why the proxy failed to to reflect actual temperatures in recent times, and might have questioned if the methodology actually applied correctly to any time in the past.

... and yet they continued to publish a dataset which they knew didn't hold up to scrutiny.

Either the proxy isn't a good proxy, or the temperature record isn't a good record. You can have either, but not both.

No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, "grafted the thermometer record onto" any reconstrution. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum. - Michael Mann

The graph was not a demonstration of the skill of their method, it was the cover graph for a report for policymakers. Their actual scientific publications show the proxy record directly. And they did not ignore the discrepancy between the two time series. The "divergence problem" is well known, well cited, and frequently discussed among dendroclimatologists. There are some reasons to believe that trees are now responding to non-climatic human influences which they previously were not subject to, such as changes in atmospheric aerosol loading, CO2 content, and pH of precipitation in some locations. You can debate whether these causes are legitimate or not, but in a graph for policymakers it's not inappropriate to drop the data where you suspect it's contaminated and switch to data you think is more trustworthy. Again, their actual publications indicate the decline which is the whole basis for the divergence problem literature in the first place. It's not like this is some huge secret that nobody knew about or the authors refused to acknowledge.

The researchers did not use certain tree ring data post 1960 because it was not properly calibrated to instrumental data. There has been much hoo-hah about this "throwing out" of data when really it is the instrumental data that matters, not the proxy data. If temperature is what you are after, thermometers are the gold standard. Therefore the post 1960 results really aren't in question

Right, so the reasonable inference would be "this proxy can't event match the temperatures we know for sure -- it's no good, throw it out entirely". However, the scientists in question are so attached to their preordained conclusions that they don't even consider this. Instead, they throw out the data they don't like, and keep what matches the conclusion they want, instead of (at least *considering*) re-evaluating the conclusion to begin with.

So they act like the proxy's correct precisely when they have less substantiation, and its failure to match the most solid data is just a problem they need to patch up later -- the so called "divergence problem". It should be called the, "Do we ever consider we might be wrong?" problem.

I'm not demanding perfection. I'm saying that, as a minimal threshold for using a proxy for past data is that it should match our most solid data. When you're allowed to arbitrarily graft new data at arbitrary points to data sets, you can make any data say anything -- that's not what science is supposed to be.

Are there other proxies that meet this minimum threshold I described? Great. Use those. But you don't get to count these tree rings in question as additional, independent confirmation. That would be like saying, "We manipulated data set B to look like data set A, therefore we have two data sets validating the hypothesis." And it's that kind of information cascade that has allowed the CRU to be held as the gold standard that all the other data sets get adjusted to match, destroying the notion of independence of the data sets.

At best, this data is too unreliable to incorporate. At worst, it's showing that temperatures actually went down. But these scientists are so far off the scientific method that they think it's okay to tweak them to say whatever they want, and call any deviation from what they wanted to see, a "problem" that needs to be corrected.

Of course I know the standard responses...I'm not a climate scientist so what do I know anything, Nature is "Dr. Jones Peer Reviewed", everyone else is paid by Exxon, blah blah blah.

Fact is that this issue is now beyond science and is being fought in the public forum. Anyone who would have the world cripple itself economically needs to be 150% above board with all their data and methods. No hiding behind anything. Anyone with a reasonable background in science should be able to take their models apart, thoroughly understand what they are doing and why and be able to replicate their work, from the friggen hunk of wood to the final graph. Hire more people to fulfill FOI request if that's what it takes.

If necessary, they should set aside a few months a year to do nothing but assist others in understanding their methods (never mind that if any other scientist had to help others replicate their work, it would be seen as a sign of fraud). Too important and busy to do that? Bullshit. Given what want everyone to do, they have an OBLIGATION to do that.

And lastly...I'm sorry but if the friggin tree ring data is not valid for assessing temperature after 1960, then it is not valid assessing temperature before 1960.

Watch Amory Lovin's TED talk. Buying energy is more expensive than saving energy. We don't need to radically shift to more costly energy sources like solar to avert the risk of climate change. Regardless of whether the effects we see today are of human origin, the fact is that continuing to burn fossil fuels at current rates is not environmentally sound policy. The pollution produced has a tangible and real impact on peoples' health, the energy infrastructure in place motivates a great deal of humanitarian

I do support nuclear, very strongly in fact. The way its being done in the US currently is retarded however. American utilities have taken a very short-term view on project pay-back and cite $7,500 + per-kW prices on new reactors and outlandish per-kWh costs to customers (Lovins has a piece denouncing nuclear because of this, but he doesn't take into consideration that its been done much cheaper elsewhere). Compare that to new reactors being built in India of both Indian and Russian design and its almost sh

Greed as usual defines what we will support. But hang on a minute, in the west we have become blind to the economic model we live with. Producing something has become so cheap that it comprises less than 20% of what you as a consumer end up paying for it. If protecting the life of your offspring is going to increase the fundamental cost of a thing by 5% for a couple of decades then I think we should be looking at that 80% of the cost of a product to find the savings to pay for the change. Ask yourself if t

And lastly...I'm sorry but if the friggin tree ring data is not valid for assessing temperature after 1960, then it is not valid assessing temperature before 1960.

There's about a million possible reasons why tree-ring observations don't seem to work for relatively recent data. It's possible that newly formed tree rings change somewhat in the 30 or 40 years after they are initially formed until they reach a "stable" form. It's possible that the substantial increases in CO2 in the atmosphere in recent years has altered the way that tree rings form.

All measurement methods have their anomalies. MRI scans are a great way to look at the structure of the brain, but they have substantial distortions, that change from machine to machine. Some of these have to do with the type of machine, and some distortions are due to things like the earth's magnetic field or the building that houses the machine. Those have to be corrected for, and it's standard practice. And, scans of young children don't give the same results, because the brain structures haven't matured, so it's difficult if not impossible to distinguish many brain structures. That doesn't mean it's not a useful method, but one does need to keep the limitations and difficulties of each measuring methodology in mind.

There are very accurate temperature measurements recorded for many places dating back to the late 1700s, recorded using a thermometer. If the tree rings for those areas match very well for the 150 years prior to 1960, but begin to diverge after that, it wouldn't be that outrageous to suggest that the inability to use them as a measurement proxy for recent times is just a limitation of the system.

It would be nice to have perfect measurements for everything. However, for those of us in the real world, all measurements have errors and limitations, and we have to adapt for these. Simply dumping uncorrected, uncalibrated, or inaccurate measurements into the pool of data does not make things clearer.

1- Deniers exhume some e-mail / piece of code which they don't understand, but assume is definite proof of evil scheming on the part of the great academic conspiracy ("Trick!" "Hide the decline!" OMGconspiracy send teh copz!!) .

2- Scientists post explanation, [uea.ac.uk] showing the deniers' allegations to be baseless (The "hidden" decline in tree ring growth was published a decade ago - see Nature link above; in this very publication, it was shown to diverge from the actual instrumental record after 1960; so for the post-1960 period we basically replace tree rings with the actual instrumental data, because we trust thermometers more than tree rings when the two fail to agree; we cited the relevant articles in the caption for the graph just to be sure).

3- Deniers completely ignore scientists' explanation, and keep fantasising about their glorious victory over evil scheming scientists. See GP for an illustration.

Rinse. Repeat.

To GP and all the folks who keep harping about this "VERY ARTIFICIAL" correction code: the code in question is a one-time code for temporarily re-calibrating the tree ring data. The reason, and the coefficients, are ultimately derived from the Nature article I linked to above. For an interesting hypothesis concerning the source of this code, see comment #147 and linked manuscript on this thread. [scienceblogs.com]

If they're going to throw out the tree ring data, throw it ALL out, not just the part you don't like. If it is valid before 1960, it is valid after 1960. Grafting on thermometer data because it fits your desired conclusion is bad science, pure and simple.

The researchers did not use certain tree ring data post 1960 because it was not properly calibrated to instrumental data.

This has nothing to do with the data being 'properly calibrated' and everything to do with the faulty assumption that ring width strong correlates with temperature, which is the assumption they use for pre-1960 data. They sold you another lie to explain the first, my friend.

Paleoclimate evidence is simply one in a number of independent lines of evidence indicating the strong likelihood that human influences on climate
play a dominant role in the observed 20th century warming of the earth’s surface.

If you did read the links, you'd see that Mann refers to "dozen model-based and proxy-based reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere mean temperature by different groups". And that was in in 2005. Do your homework.

I guess this means you seriously do think that all of climate science hinges on one single study.

The problem is that it is not "denialist's crap." I will not deny global warming for the same reasons that I will not agree with it. The scientific research that has been presented to me, coupled with the research I have done on my own confirms that we, as a population, have no clue what exactly is going on; therefore, we are just along for the ride on a planet that we happen to inhabit. Does this mean that we should not do what we can to take care of our "house"? No, it does not. It simply means that we are trying to solve a problem that may not even exist. Any speculation on what may have happened in the past is exactly that, speculation. All I can do, as an individual who respects the planet I live on, is take care of it because I should.

Why would you prove that which is pretty much known to be false. The retreat was likely caused by the combination of substantially less plant mass and steady state volcanic activity which slowly rose CO2 levels. The rapid acceleration of melt off was aided by establishment of the thermohaline circulation which warmed the NW coast of Europe and the NW coast of North America.

It's believed that the northern U.S. was covered in a 5,000 foot thick ice cap (some time in the last 100k years). It created the 5 Great Lakes.

You should rush out and tell a scientist. Maybe they didn't know that the temperature has changed before!

OK, I am being facetious, but I can never understand why people think that they have discovered something that climate scientists didn't know (or didn't want you to know). Yes, it has been hot before and it has been cold before. The problem today is the rate of change. It is getting hot very quickly in the global scheme of things.

Also, if Anthropogenic Global Warming were true, why hasn't recorded human history, vis-a-vis, the last 1,000 years or so, shown a consistent increase in global temperatures?

The population 1000 years ago was estimated to be 300 million. Over the nex

"Finally, here is a question for all the deniers out there. If the engineering feat required today was to actually warm up the planet, how would we do it? I think that the best answer would be to do what were are already doing today."

Depends on the feedback mechanisms between CO2 and the really potent greenhouse gasses. Which it is now very clear that the researchers in question haven't got a very good handle on.

Finally, about the term "denier" - this little "trick" (sorry) to tie a broad range of "unaccept

If one completely ignores any of the above data sets (whether they be direct measurements or proxies), there exist many disparate observations of global warming ranging from the rise in sea level which threatens various nations' lands...which has been either minimal or non-detectable, as opposed to what the AGW fans have been telling us. Not exactly a good point.

You should also note that if you go back to the beginning of serious AGW science (during the late 1980s), most of their predictions have already been falsified. The globe should be at least a half-degree warmer than observed (check the "Hockey Stick" graph in its earlier incarnations), the oceans should be at least a foot deeper (up to five feet higher today, according to some predictions), and storms should be much, much more severe (they're not). None of these things have happened over the last twenty years, therefore THEY WERE WRONG.

Let us assume that what you say is true. You are basically telling us that we should dismiss climate change research, because (according to you) some of the early papers got it wrong. Can you see the problem with your "reasoning"?

Those lost cities have nothing to do with warming one way or the other. Hint: geological processes exist.

Exactly! You got it! So, when we talk about ancient history, we can calmly attribute things to geological processes, that we have no control over. But when dealing with our own times, we aren't going to skip a good opportunity to raise taxes and give more control to the government. Scratch almost every modern "environmentalist" and you'll find a worn-out Che Guevara T-shirt underneath...

Nobody tried to argue that anthropogenic global warning traveled back in time to make it a desert.

Actually, you can be sure, there were people explaining the climate change and/or the rising sea levels, that flooded the entire cities, by the anger of the gods. You can also bet safely, that various priests back then suggested (and demanded) large sacrifices to appease the supernaturals.

Kinda like what Al Gore is doing now [thepeoplescube.com] (warning, unsafe amounts of sarcasm at the link)...

The source code is another thing that has been taken completely out of context. For example, the "Very ARTIFICIAL correction" in was computed, but the line where it was applied was commented out. This is clearly a case of someone playing around with the output to explore various effects and scenarios. They did the experiment, then commented it out to removed that effect from the production output. Does anyone really believe that a real attempt at fraud would be blatantly labeled in the code?

FFS, not this shit again. Frankly, given the number of times this has been pointed out, I can only assume that people still mentioning it are wilfully ignoring anything that contradicts them.

However, one last time. It's commonplace to have multiple versions of analysis code with variations including "artificial" changes. I've done it lots of times, mostly for testing purposes - it's quite useful [1] to know how the output of your analysis depends on variations in the input. Only a small fraction of the code in existence was actually used to process the data "for real". Unless you have some evidence that a) arbitrary modifications were made to published data without explanation in the publication and b) any such modifications were not scientifically justified, please stop with this ridiculous and discredited point.

Really? When you're objectively trying to find something such as a temperature signal it's common to fudge this way and that? BTW, the decline is *still* in that tree ring data, but is not being shown because when tree ring data supports a fudged temperature set, it's worth reporting to the IPCC. When it doesn't, there is some unknown force burying the AGW signal. Who are the denialists again?

Without revision control one can't say for certain but there's no evidence any adjusted data made it into a paper. There's only evidence that a single piece of code from the thousands of modeling sims had at one time an adjustment that was commented out.

From looking at the files, this does not seem to be true in all instances. Even if it was uncommented everywhere, we still would not know if it actually made it into published results.
Sounds like a job for someone of audit and figure out what actually happened and how outraged to be realistically.
I wonder if they have learned their lesson and will actually cooperate instedd of stonewall.

If anything, this code tells me that whoever wrote it was very careful not to use bad data. Why else would you mark the modification with a three line comment with big letters and double exclamation marks pointing out that the following lines are artificial? The only time I write comments like that is when I want to make sure nobody accidentally compiles the code with it still in there.

This is the opposite of what I would expect from someone in a conspiracy.

On that same blog you link to [jgc.org], there is an "Update":
Read the comments below. It's been pointed out to me that there's a later version of code in the archive in which similar correction code is not commented out. Details and link below.

It is not a matter of trust. It is a matter of learning to read IDL code (which is not that hard) and comparing the plotting commands to the published plot.

As for the "hopeless state" comment, that sounds quite plausible, and it is fully consistent with the way the code appears to have been use to experiment with various ways of correcting the data for the various problems in the data. This sort of thing goes on all the time. It is called experimentation, and it is the way that science is done. In real life things do not wok like they do on CSI.

Yeah right, the whole "house of cards" has crumbled due to one line of source code that was never published. How about doing a bit of homework and finding out why the unpublished graph was labelled VERY ARTIFICIAL?

As for the so called "missing data" it seems the MET have noted the advice in the Nature editorial and are now petitioning 188 countries for permission to publish the remaining few percent of records still tied up in red tape.

The sad irony here is that Jones has spent most of his carrer making the other 95% of those records easily accesible to the scientific community.

"Sharing data with scientists who already agree with you isn't science."

I don't defend his apparent attempt to thwart one of the 50 odd FOI request he has on his plate by requesting Mann delete some emails. However I do defend his commitment to opening up the data sources. The HADCrut [hadobs.org] data set has been available on the web to scientists, the general public, and psudeo-skeptics alike for years due mainly to his efforts. However I don't expect easily verifyable facts to stop uninformed wankers from being lead around by nose for fun and profit.

As the Nature editorial points out a small percentage of that set is still locked up by national governments such as France and is only available to researchers willing to fillout the red tape and wait months to get it, they are leaglly bound not to publish it!!! If not for the efforts of Jones 100% of the data would still be locked up with similar red tape.

I have no doubt as to the motives of the CEI and their ilk who continually bombard climate scientists with such requests while simultaneously running inumerable front sites for the FF industry (eg:icecap), and doing their very best to smear the reputations of leading climate scientists (eg: Mann, Schmidt).

The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hearthere is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather thansend to anyone.

So before filing FOI requests it sounds like they were making requests through normal channels. Of course I'm sure Jones was only joking about deleting the data before he would share it, right? Note that Jones also makes numerous references to "hiding" behind various things (non-publishing agreements, data secrecy acts, etc.) This is hardly the acts of someone who loves to share data.

Also note that the data he was "sharing" is his already "adjusted" numbers. Yes there are perfectly valid reasons to adjust data, however the CRU kept no record (apparently) of how or why the numbers were adjusted. Now they say the raw data was thrown out in the 80's (even though they were discussing how to keep it hidden as recently as this summer.)

Whether you agree or disagree with the whole AGW thing, the fact is these guys were not conducting science so much as politics. Anyone looking at this who loves science and believes fully in the peer-review process should be disgusted by what these guys were up to. We essentially have a giant table of numbers they created and their word that nothing is wrong and we should believe them. That's not science.

Except that legitimate scientists don't pester for data via legal force, such as FoI requests. They may request it, or not believe results if it's not provided, but the fact that they're resorting to such means suggests bad intent.

On reading many of these posts that show up whenever climate change is mentioned, I am reminded of the following article, which I will quote below in its entirety. I found it in Scientific American [scientificamerican.com].

War Is Peace: Can Science Fight Media Disinformation?
In the 24/7 Internet world, people make lots of claims. Science provides a guide for testing them
By Lawrence M. Krauss

When I saw the statement repeated online that theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge would be dead by now if he lived in the U.K. and had to depend on the National Health Service (he, of course, is alive and working in the U.K., where he always has), I reflected on something I had written a dozen years ago, in one of my first published commentaries:

“The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origins of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.”

As I listen to the manifest nonsense that has been promulgated by the likes of right-wing fanatic radio hosts and moronic ex-governors in response to the effort to bring the U.S. into alignment with other industrial countries in providing reasonable and affordable health care for all its citizens, it seems that things have only gotten worse in the years since I first wrote those words.

English novelist George Orwell was remarkably prescient about many things, and one of the most disturbing aspects of his masterpiece 1984 involved the blatant perversion of objective reality, using constant repetition of propaganda by a militaristic government in control of all the media.

Centrally coordinated and fully effective reinvention of reality has not yet come about in the U.S. (even though a White House aide in the past administration came chillingly close when he said to a New York Times reporter, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”). I am concerned, however that something equally pernicious, at least to the free exercise of democracy, has.

The rise of a ubiquitous Internet, along with 24-hour news channels has, in some sense, had the opposite effect from what many might have hoped such free and open access to information would have had. It has instead provided free and open access, without the traditional media filters, to a barrage of disinformation. Nonsense claims had more difficulty gaining traction in the days when print journalism held sway and newspaper editors had the final word on what made its way into homes and when television news consisted of a half-hour summary of what a trained producer thought were the most essential stories of the day.

Now fabrications about “death panels” and oxymoronic claims that ”government needs to keep its hands off of Medicare” flow freely on the Internet, driving thousands of zombielike protesters to Washington to argue that access to health care will undermine their fundamental freedom to have their insurance canceled if they get sick. And 24-hour news channels, desperate to provide ”breaking” coverage at all hours, end up serving as public relations vehicles for any celebrity who happens to make an outrageous claim or, worse, decide that the competition for ratings requires them to be anything but ”fair and balanced” in their reporting.

“Fair and balanced,” however, doesn’t mean putting all viewpoints, regardless of their underlying logic or validity, on an equal footing. Discerning the merits of competing claims is where the empirical basis of science should play a role. I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false. What fails the test of empirical reality, as determined by

Once thing that's certain: this, like all other climate research relating to AGW, will descend into a hyper-partisan he said-she said type argument. This guarantees it will be impossible for anyone unwilling or unable to validate and analyze the data themselves to come to a rational conclusion.

One thing is crystal clear: these guys are biased in a way that is completely antithetical to true scientific research.

Both the Nature article mentioned in the summary and the NS article linked by Idiomatick are clear and sensible articles and well worth a read. I do not, of course, hold out any hope that they will prevent the oil company shills and SUV drivers from baying for blood.

I neither work for an oil company or drive an SUV, but I can tell you what I don't like about the emails (not that you have to believe any of that from an internet person).

No one can deny that AGW is a highly politicized topic: you have affirmed this by talking about shills. Nonetheless, it would be hoped that scientists have managed to largely stay away from the politicization. These emails show they haven't. They show that even some of the top scientists in the field have been caught up in the politica

Right, because the guys who got millions in grants because they said the "sky is falling" are so much more trustworthy? Dr. Phil Jones received grants in the 90s in the thousands of dollars, since 1998 the grants he has received have been in the millions of dollars.

"A few suspect emails do not destroy millions of man hours of research."

Of course not. But when the main suppliers of that information to policy makers turn out to be advocates of a dogma with a vested interest in manipulating that data, in colluding to hide contrary information, in DISPOSING (whups! accident!) of the raw data sets that they've compiled, attacking critics, and generally behaving as if they have something to conceal, it IS possible for those individuals to taint that research and especially the conclusions drawn therefrom.

Who Watches the Watchmen, indeed?

It's a known psychological fact that very often the victims of a con will be the most vociferous defenders of the con artists - they are now defending their own reputation and self-image, no longer mere facts of 'does this snake oil work or not?'.

A few suspect emails do not destroy millions of man hours of research.

The Humanity in general and the Western civilization in particular were on trial. We are accused of "destroying Gaia" and facing the punishment of huge fines and severe drop in the quality of life (such as living with worms composting our garbage [metro.us]).

So, guess what? When, suddenly, thanks to a whistle-blower (whom the prominent Illiberals in Congress want prosecuted [thehill.com], BTW), we learn of the massive prosecutorial misconduct (some of it, such as deleting files after receiving Freedom of Information requests, outright criminal), that affects a substantial amount of evidence against us, we move for the "court" to dismiss the entire case.

From what I gather, the sources may be independent, but there are a few middle men that this data has to go through simply because it has to be normalized with other data. One of the most important of these middle men (who as far as I can tell controls significant aggregates of historical data) has been shown to engage in systemic and unscientific bias. Further, this group has significant connections to the IPCC working groups. Similar biases have been found against the other major groups (NOAA and NASA related groups in the US).

To be blunt, here's a list of things that I think need to be done. First, all data and processes need to be made public domain. Simply put, proprietary data that can't be released to the public has no place in scientific research. It doesn't matter if industry-paid hacks attack anything they can find. If we can't duplicate the calculations, using your data and programs that went into your research, then we can't say whether you did it at all in the first place.

Second, there needs to be some degree of separation between the politics and the science. For example, James Hansen [wikipedia.org] who currently heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (which is NASA's group for studying the climate) has engaged in a great deal of politics over the years, throwing away any pretense of objectivity. For example, he says [guardian.co.uk]:

In Hansen's view, dealing with climate change allows no room for the compromises that rule the world of elected politics. "This is analagous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill," he said. "On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can't say let's reduce slavery, let's find a compromise and reduce it 50% or reduce it 40%."

Ignoring that carbon emissions can be dealt with through compromise (even in the worst cases) and hence are not like slavery or the spread of totalitarian ideologies, would a person with this sort of viewpoint "cook the books" when it comes to their science? Why not? When I see accusations of NASA data manipulation coupled with refusal to honor FOIA requests and highly ideological, crude public statements like the above of key officials, then it looks like a pattern of unscientific behavior to me. They can at least act like grownups.

The people trying to force carbon emission reduction need to take their time. If they're right, then a little more time will simply solidify their position further, especially since there's no urgency in the matter according to current research. If they're wrong about the need to reduce human carbon emissions, then that'll help humanity collectively. For example, Hanson has been crying "wolf" since 1989. Even if the science is determined now (I still don't believe we've shown that human activity has a significant global warming effect), it wasn't then.

Finally, there needs to be a genuine cost/benefit analysis of the possible choices, including various geoengineering options and procrastination. It doesn't have to be perfect, but I'm tired of the nebulous claims of disaster made by anthropic global warming proponents (Hanson in the linked story above claims "tens of meters" of sea level rise, but doesn't bother to say over what time period this rise occurs).

Other than the CRU and NASA, who else publishes this data? I was under the impression they were the only two generating global temperature data sets and neither has been willing to show all of their work.

When you have a minute though, you should update the Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] page to add your list of the many independent sources.

It is not the millions of dollars in research grants that you need to worry about. It is the hundreds of billions of dollars in industries that stand to be affected if this research is true that you need to be concerned about. Follow the money.

And the apparent lack of transparency regarding the code, I submit that the researchers under fire be asked to use the code in question to reproduce their results under observation, explaining how they did it.

Everyone seems to be focused on what is found in the emails and what is significant and what is not etc. But just look at what is NOT there. For years the skeptics side has been alleging a conspiracy, funded by communists, socialists, George Soros, Al Gore... Some global anti-American organization slyly orchestrating a campaign to emasculate America!

What do you see in these mails? Remember these scientists think they are talking in private and never anticipated being found out. Are there mentions or references to dark projects? Some references to their agents and their handlers? Strong ideological opinions to destroy Capitalism and install a world Government?

What happened is very simple. These scientists are used to one kind of debate and one kind of rules. Where "the conclusions reached by Kogen, et al [8] is not supported by the evidence presented by them [9],[10],[11]" would be considered a grave insult and might cause loss of reputation. In the question and answer session in a seminar someone saying, "But, Dr Kaplansky, with a sample size of 27, the correlation coefficient you have arrived at is less than experimental error" wouild result in a collective gasp and "ole!" from the assembled people, usually about 20 people who could actually understand the paper being presented.

These scientists are encountering the rough and tumble world of popular journalism, spin meistering. They are clueless about how to handle it. They feel they are being gravely insulted and highly manipulated. They think they are being quote mined, quoted out of context. The journalists are giving totally irrelevant and completely debunked theorists equal time for balance. So they go about in their clueless ways to counter it. They over react, they try to be more guarded, they are trying to write sentences that could not be quote mined.

Now that people have glimpse of the actual communications between the scientists, compare that to say, the hacked emails of Sarah Palin, See where you find more smoking guns.

The people who are trying to sow FUD against AGW know that it doesn't matter what was actually in those emails. What matters is the accusations that they can hurl about without anyone really challenging them.

We thought that the media had grown a pair of proverbial balls after the Bush fiasco, but we were wrong. It almost seems to be going in the wrong direction, where they are less challenging than they were before for fear of *not* getting that interview.

Yet, there are some scientists who end up seeing things that aren't there.

An example from recent times is Benveniste and his "memory of water" results [bbc.co.uk]. Benveniste had become convinced that he and his team had discovered compelling evidence for a real, measurable mechanism behind homeopathy (other than the placebo effect). He had gathered plenty of data to support his hypothesis that water had "memory", and Nature agreed to publish his paper if the science could be verified independently. Benveniste was forced to open his lab and his methods to investigation, and eventually James Randi (for it was he) discovered that bias was being introduced into the experiments because the researchers knew which water samples were supposed to have "memory". With double-blind testing, the evidence for "memory" vanished into the statistical noise.

This is firstly an example of the scientific method working correctly. An extraordinary claim is made, independently tested, and found to be either true or (in this case) false. But, more importantly, it is an example of the scientific method failing spectacularly for Benveniste: a scientist who managed to fool himself. Pons and Fleischmann, the "inventors of cold fusion", are also good examples. Robert Park, author of "Voodoo Science", has filled an entire book with examples like this.

Generally, these people did not intend to mislead. Instead, they fooled themselves. No conspiracy, just humanity.

When I say I am skeptical about AGW, it is because I suspect that climate scientists may also have been fooling themselves. The evidence they present seems (to me) to be very noisy, and I think there may be some degree of "seeing what you expect to see" in the data. Because they have deliberately sought to shut out independent investigators who might have identified problems in the experiments and models, this problem has not been addressed. They may be right about AGW, they may not, but in either case they have not given the impression of sticking to the proper scientific process. Given the massive importance of this issue, and the extraordinary claims that have been made, I feel that extraordinary evidence is warranted. I do not think this makes me a "denialist". I think this makes me a skeptic: someone unwilling to assume that things are true, just because an authority figure says they are.

It makes me very sad to see that Nature is not raising these points and instead brushing them aside.

... will be bamboozled. There is nothing new in that. It lies behind all political folly.

The data that was adjusted was paleoclimate data, and what it was being adjusted to was temperature data (i.e., the more reliable modern temperature data). As far as I can tell, they neither could nor did adjust the measured temperature data.

The OP did not quote the really important part of the Nature piece :

Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.

The evidence for this is literally all around us. Throw all of the CRU data out if you want. It won't change a thing.

I thought people have been questioning the modern temp data for a while due to land use and urban heat effect. Climate Audit has been tracking this aspect for a while now. We might be warming, but the warming is not universal and nothing more than what has happened in the past. In the context of 1000-1500 years, the warming that happene between 1950-2000 is nothing to be afraid of. To quote CRU:

"The principal conclusion from these studies (summarized in IPCC AR4) is that the second half of the 20th century was very likely (90% probable) warmer than any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely (66% probable) the warmest in the past 1300 years."

Before any of this email stuff, climateaudit caught NASA adjusting the output so that the 1940's blip was not more than the latter half of the century. I seem to recall it was a error in how the program was rounding the numbers. Climateaudit made a new graph with 1940's showing the warmest year. NASA reproduced the results and then later produced a new chart that showed the 1990's having the warming year with the 1940's the second warmest.

To quote another post of this subject (a href="http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11531">strata-sphere.com):

"Well, the raw CRU data shows that the first half of the last century (1900-1960) was as warm or warmer than it is today. But even if it was not warmer, it was within the uncertainty of the processed data. But let’s assume this claim still holds water, so what if this was the warmest half century since the beginning of the Little Ice Age! We have only had 3 half centuries since the LIA ended! We all know the Earth has been thankfully warming since this bleak time in humanity’’s brief existence."

1) they're guilty of not properly responding to a FOIA request2) they've said nasty things about certain colleagues work (but still cited it)3) they've discarded some data for reasons they should have better explained (reasons that were valid -- it wasn't properly calibrated)

Bad for them personally, but utterly irrelevant to the scientific issue, unless you think it's some kind of surprise that scientists are human and sometimes make mistakes. As the Nature article says, it's laughable. Where's the global conspiracy? Where's the outright fraud of substantial masses of crucial data? Nowhere.

It's worth investigating for the possibility of misconduct, but, sheesh, the actual scientific impact is so overblown it's ridiculous. This is why you have many, many other scientists working on the same issues and completely independent ones: so that even if one of them makes an honest or a dishonest mistake, or one method yields incorrect results, the other people and techniques are likely to find the flaw and correct it.

The only "trick" here is the propaganda trick climate-change denialists are using to divert attention from the actual data and results of the last few decades.

Smoking gun? It's like they've (illegally) broken into the house owned by someone they've publicly accused of murder for a decade and found a plastic gun replica that shoots Nerf balls. Aha!! Gotcha!

It's more than that. Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, wrote that he'd delete the data before he'd turn it over to "skeptics". Then they claim that they "lost" the data some time in the 80's. That seems to imply that he deleted the data far more recently than the 80's, say in the last couple of years. That would be a crime, not merely "not properly responding to an FOIA request".

2) they've said nasty things about certain colleagues work (but still cited it)
3) they've discarded some data for reasons they should have better explained (reasons that were valid -- it wasn't properly calibrated)

4) they arranged to have a journal editor fired for publishing a peer reviewed article that questioned conclusions reached by AGW promoters.

5) They arranged to have certain research excluded from IPCC's survey of climate science literature. The influence of the CRU on the IPCC process (which in turn provides the primary political justification for carbon emission reduction) was significant.
6) The code comments indicate that much of the data was poor quality, further that much of the "improperly calibrated" data wasn't afterwards "properly calibrated" (at least to the knowledge of the programmer).

Mostly because the "debate" was in the 1980s and the current situation is PR versus reality. Consider that most of this crap is coming out of the "Heartland Institute", a bunch that will also tell you that smoking does not cause any health problems.

When you have gigabytes of private correspondence to sift through of course you can cherry pick / quote mine something to make it look like a conspiracy. That is all some anti-global warmer bloggers have done. They have engaged in the same sort of quotemining that creationists like to go in for which says a lot about the strength of their arguments.

I'm sorry, but did someone at/. forget to mention that the CRU emails did have evidence of a conspiracy to blacklist opposing scientific viewpoints from peer reviewed publications? Did someone forget that Nature, for some years, has been itself criticized for such blacklisting?

Well, we all know that Nature, NASA, and the U.N. are prime players in the conspiracy. As are NOAA, the National Academy of Sciences, and the science academies of Brazil, China and India.

I mean, either there's a massive conspiracy by climatologists all around the world, or a handful of corporate shills and religious true believers (including both fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist propertarians) have the media's ear and are quoting stuff out of context and flat-out inventing shit. And that's impossible [unreasonable.org], right?

If AGW was actually happening, there would be no need to "adjust" numbers and likewise no need to cover up the leaked emails

Here in the southern hemisphere we have just started our summer. According to my measurements, it is hotter now than it was six months ago. As you say, there is no need to adjust any numbers, so this means we have proof of global warming.

But seriously, there are plenty of reasons why you might need to adjust some data. New measuring equipment (from alternative manufacturers), procedural changes meaning measurements are taken at different times of the day or even a different place. An organisation might stop

You can follow the original link to realclimate.org to find many other links to data sources. I have posted the data sources above only because many critics of AGW won't even bother with realclimate.org as they are thought to be part of the conspiracy. The data exists and is public as is the source code.

Is that a journal where the hockey team review each others papers anonymously? No surprise that they won't investigate anything.

Dude, you're not just talking about any journal here. You're talking about THE journal for the physical sciences. This journal has more than a century of scientific reporting as testament to its quality. It predates the Nobel price. It predates the work of Einstein and Schrödinger. Interestingly though it is not older than the discovery of the atmospheric greenhouse effect, which was first described by Fourier in 1824.

1) That paper is nearly a year old so the logic that "Now finally counter arguments can be heard" seems a bit specious.

2) That paper is a complete crock of unrefereed shit. I read 92-94 which are the conclusions and was so confused I went and read the earlier portions. There are numerous fallacies in their assumptions and they get some pretty fundamental thermo issues flat wrong.

I find it fascinating that denailists like yourself express wild fantasies with religious overtones when complaining about science. I also find it interesting how you are so willing to assert conspiracies of gigantic proportions to explain consensus in the scientific community. It's pretty pathetic to see people so divorced from reality.

There comes a point where the scientific evidence in support of a theory is so overwhelming that those who deny its truth are either ignorant or denialists.

We don't take HIV/AIDS denialism seriously, we don't take tobacco/lung cancer denialists seriously, we don't take moon landing conspiracy theorists seriously, we don't take young earth creationists seriously. While there is some uncertainty in the ultimate extent of climate change (as with any scientific prediction), the fundamentals (i.e. radiative forc

"must stand up to rigorous scientific questioning" - true, indeed. The problem is that Global Warming has done so convincingly several times over and still some people refuse to bulge. Hence, denialists.

If this was an ordinary scientific issue it really wouldn't matter: graduate students tend to avoid bad scientists and so denialists die out. Unfortunately, this is not a ordinary scientific issue, but one that begets an extremely important current policy issue; one that may require all sorts of weird things, like actual global governance. I, personally, would very much prefer if the lunatics would shut up and let the rest of us get on to figure out what to do.

Since when does the right care about science? They can't even get an issue as simple and data-rich as sex education right, but now I'm supposed to believe that it's all about the evidence?

I used to have doubts about AGW because I heard so many skeptics, but now that they've dropped their masks and are trying to move in for the kill I see that the whole thing is just like the evolution "debate". Conspiracy theories ("It's the evil liberals! They want to destroy capitalism!"), quotes out of context, repeating the same tired debunked arguments year after year... The only difference is that the ideology behind it is a little more popular -- the strawman liberal is apparently a more plausible villain to most people than the strawman atheist.